Sunday I preached on Jonah. The reading included the line God changed His mind about wiping out the Assyrian city. I preached on the Hebrwe word (which means: repentance, regret, change mind, etc.) and asked what the Bible is telling us about God. This is something I have written on before and it is something that I wrestled with in my conversations with an atheist some weeks ago.
The point I made was that most Christians are so tied up thinking about the whale (and arguing) that they never really look at the point of the story. In surveying commentaries and websites I was struck by two things. No one addressed God changing His mind. However, many writers made 'historicity' the primary focus of their discussion. Let me be clear, I really get the whole obsession with "did it really happen?" In an age where so much aggressive agnostic/atheistic attacks are taking place, doubts are rampant among Believers and so we need a foundation. However, we create our own problems, sometimes, when we end up defending things which we do not need to defend. Saying that Jonah is history, rather than a parable, is not more faithful. It is not holier or more courageous or more dedicated to God. In fact, it misses the point. The Truth is in every generation countless 'prophets' have neglected the call and countless 'undeserving' folks have repented. It happens over and again. Those of us with TVs know that fictional shows constantly tell stories that are 'not' historical yet reflect what happens time and time again.
Whether Jonah is fact or fiction, it is also literature. And the question before us is "what does this piece of literature tell us about God?" Therefore, what does it mean that Almighty God, the Creator of heaven and earth, The Unseen, Perfect, All-Knowing, source of all that is can change His mind?
In Ancient Greece there were two sets of stories about God/gods. One was told by philosophers. They reflected logically, parsed the meaning of words, pondered what this means as applied to God. To this day even Christians who reject philosophy are impacted by the thoughts of these ancient people. They set the preconceptions with which we approach the text and inform how we read and understand. The work the philosophers did is often very dry and technical and can be more than we can handle intellectually.
The second set of stories is the Greek myths. These stories are filled with all manner of characters, interesting situations, foibles, heroism, all manner of evil and even some virtue. Early Christian apologists often attacked paganism because the religious myths were filled with such things. In any case, narratives about the gods were terribly different from philosophical reflections about God.
The point being, when we talk about God we end up employing two different modes of communication. The philosophical approach is filled with questions of being (ontology). It seeks to address the essence of Who God is. The story/myth approach reflects on questions of activity. It answers every day questions about gods in the world. The Jewish/Christian corrects the errors of tha Greek myths, even while acknowledging that once God enters human time and space something seems different.
The Judaeo-Christian Bible is not intended to be either philosophy or myth. Even so, there are still some parallels. Stories of God use human language to convey the unconveyable. So when we read "God changed His mind/repented" we need to ask what is being told to us. It is anthropomorphism, i.e., using human language to talk about God. The question remains, what does God changing His mind mean? My answer is Christmas (incarnation) and Good Friday (the Cross). I will flesh that out more tomorrow.
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